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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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"Paranormal" is such a loaded phrase; too much preconcieved baggage. Maybe you would have gotten more (unguarded) response had you said 'Unexplained/unexplainable' experiences?
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drljefe
climber
Old Pueblo, AZ
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I started having ghost experiences as a kid. A few heavy ones. That one~liner photo I posted upthread was a particularly crazy instance.
I "deja vu" everyday.
I've seen some messed up "witchy/ dark magic/ native american" stuff.
Then there were all those crazy things on the road with the Dead.
I've always figured that if we are really only using ten percent of our brains, what's up with that other 80 percent? (10 percent GONE in my case) There have to be instincts/perception/sensors that are supressed or untapped.
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Everyone has those experiences, I think many don't acknowledge them. We are aware of more than we are comfortable living with.
The Cat is a good example, I don't know that it is useful to try to figure it out, but better to let the experience open to you over time. Do you know more from having the 'facts'? or from being informed by what the situation over time builds for you?
What about schroddinger's cat? Ed could help us understand this "paranormal" construct...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrödinger's_cat
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drljefe
climber
Old Pueblo, AZ
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Definitely not all "dark", which isn't to say not scary.
The witchcraft jazz, and native american strong magic are things I never want to witness or experience again. Powers used in a malevolent fashion ain't cool. Homey don't play that. Skinwalkers can take a hike.
And if I never saw another ghost again, I'd be stoked.
But I just got a house in the oldest part of town...
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Leggs
Sport climber
California originally, Old Pueblo presently..
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But I just got a house in the oldest part of town...
~our house isn't haunted, babe... but i'm not sure about the Water Co. building across the way... THAT PLACE creeps me out~let's explore
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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that house reminds me of the whaley house museum in old town san diego, purportedly the most haunted house in the u.s. most of the museum workers will have a ghostly encounter to tell of.
it seems old man whaley just loved his old place and decided to continue to hang out and has been a bit proprietary about what is done with it. whether you want to believe it all or not, it has resulted in an extraordinary window back into early california.
richard senate, who still seems to be going strong in the ghost business, says that a number of ghosts seem to involve people with big egos and big ideas. an interesting report in that vein is the ghost of abbott kinney, the imaginative developer of venice, california, sometimes seen walking abbott kinney boulevard. one of my favorite haunts there is abbott's habit coffee shop, "damn fine coffee", with a gleeful, coffee-guzzling devil on the logo, a great place for an old fart to look at young women who have not yet learned the secrets of putting on weight. it's almost like italy that way.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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LEB, i'd be interested in what you learned researching this fellow.
lolli mentioned that there was a whole pamphlet published about the history of her haunted farmstead, but she didn't take much interest in it. some people are fairly "live and let live" when there's a ghost around.
richard senate took us on a field trip to downtown ventura, where he worked in an official capacity as city historian at the time. he's kind of a "real deal" guy with many interests, not just a morbid fascination. he published a book on erle stanley gardner, who was a practicing lawyer in ventura and who used much of his experience there in the perry mason novels.
the ventura mission has a number of ghosts associated with it, and richard spoke of trying to form a "friends of ghosts" society to extend a peaceful hand, if possible, to troubled ghosts from the living.
one ghost we tinkered with was at the ortega adobe, just down the street from the mission. richard gave everyone bent-coathanger divining rods for this, and i frankly didn't think much of it all. nobody was picking up the ghost or the old building walls or whatever, but we continued poking around the place for an hour. he told the story of the patriarch of the ortega family--this was the family that started the ortega chile company. the guy was in his 90s and sitting on the front porch watching a couple young men trying to break a mule to saddle. he didn't think the whippersnappers knew what they were doing, so he insisted on taking over. he wound up with a broken neck and was taken indoors.
i agreed to give the divining wires a try and damned if the things didn't start acting up. they pushed against me and i backed against a wall of the house. that was the spot, richard said, where the old man died. i felt kinda involved, so i went out to my car and got my lovely hohner chromatic (harmonica) and played the old geezer an impromptu elegy. we all left with a feeling of peace and, for me, connectedness to someone departed.
drljefe seems to have had some experience of skinwalkers, which tony hillerman mentions in many of his novels from navajo country.
the navajos traditionally live in a six-sided house called a hogan with a view to the rising sun. hogan sites are selected for the beauty of the view out the front door. the greatest ideal of the navajo is to "walk in beauty".
if someone is dying in a navajo household, they are taken outside to die, lest their "chindi", the bad part of their souls, be cursed to confinement in the home and harrass the family. if someone should die indoors--i'm mentioning this because of the ortega story--a hole is broken in the wall for the chindi to escape, and the family must abandon the house forever.
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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well, that's pretty amusing.
seems like i've read that in england you have to disclose such things. some properties carry a lot of baggage.
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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"Don't cross the streams,"
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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tony bird
LEB
priceless
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Tony Bird
climber
Northridge, CA
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wade should stick to what he does best, subliminal advertising.
after the failure of his previous sideline, he took to hanging around medlicott dome, where you can always pick up used ropes on the cheap. he enhances them with leftover aloha shirt dye and markets at josh campgrounds. i wish i had his business acumen. if you need further explanation:
http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.php?topic_id=1226243&msg=1226255#msg1226255
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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the battle here is experiences vs. rational explanation
it is a difficult battle for rationalists to win, everyone has experiences and "believes" in them where as they don't have a firm grasp of rational explanation.
Let's take another tact at analysis: astrology.
For the purpose of simplifying the analysis, assume that all stars in the Zodiac are at the distance of Alpha-Centauri, 4.12e16 m, and also have the mass 2.19e30 kg
The gravitational force on a 3kg newborn would be something like 2.57e-13 N
Could that force be large enough to have any effect on a 3kg infant?
Well, what else would exert that force? it turns out that an object weighing 1.28 grams a meter away. There are a lot more objects like that, and larger forces from just random items near the birth..
So could the alignment of the stars have any influence on the infant's character?
The answer is no.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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you should be thanking me, I have a lot of reservations posting to this rather intellectually flaccid thread
did you understand my last post, LEB?
we do not have detectors sensitive enough to measure the force of Alpha-Centauri
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Ah astrology!
I once bought a booklet -Through the Year with Pisces (the most psychic of the astrological signs by the way) and at the end of each day compared what it said would happen that day with what did happen that. Over a year, I found it to be correct 50% of the time - random chance.
On that level I agree with Ed.
However, in India, astrological charts are drawn up at the time of birth to let the parents know the particular karma of that child. They're seen as personality charts and many of them seem to have been remarkably accurate. Of course it could be random chance and only the successful ones get publicized etc.
However, something else could be at work too. What if our personality is partially determined not by the stars but by what is going on within our own planet and solar system at a certain time? The ancients looked to the stars as the answer but perhaps electrical, magnetic, biological etc. cycles are going on that we are yet unaware of, which occur each year when the earth is in a certain position and therefore the correlation is there with the stars but they are not the cause?
We have after all, discovered that the time of year we are conceived and born affect our body, personality and mortality rates even in modern times with modern medicine. We can also correlate phases of the moon with behavior, something that is magnified on a small island where this makes for big tide changes etc. etc.
Perhaps the larger question is where do we want to put our society's time and money?
Building bigger accelerators, sending more probes into space, learning more about our earth, or learning more about our own biology? So far we actually know very little about ourselves, our planet or our vast universe.
Edit:
It therefore seems more appropriate to concentrate on figuring out the obvious first, such as DNA and child raising practices on the outcome of the human personality, rather than much more subtle possibilities like the electricity, magnetism, chemistry and biology of the place and time when we were born which which may or may not be a factor.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves.. - William Shakespeare
Which is about all that needs to be said about astrology, and similar nonsense.
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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d-know
Trad climber
electric lady land
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boo.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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ok, I am going to be unpleasant...
LEB - you have failed the easiest of tests to pass. That failure indicates to me that were I to spend time answering the question you are yearning to have answered, that it would be a total waste because you would not understand the answer in the least.
I don't have time to waste.
Jan - honestly if you want to believe in such foolishness go ahead... but you make such a silly, gratuitous swipe I can hardly avoid rising to the bait. You state:
Perhaps the larger question is where do we want to put our society's time and money?
Maybe if you looked at the USG's apportionment of funding research, say for FY09 where the final numbers are known, you'd see that $10B goes to the NIH, the National Institute of Health. All DOE funding is $4B, NASA, less than $1B, NSF is something like $3B...
So NIH receives the largest share of R&D budget... accelerators, by the way, and other such things, High Energy Physics (HEP), are less than $0.7B total...
Now NIH R&D is directed to learn the biology of us...
...oh, I forgot, that is for a western view of biology, NIH only spent $122M on their "National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine" (about 20% of the HEP spending in DOE).
And it turns out that the technologies that are required to do HEP R&D are useful for the NIH R&D too... not to mention the fact that the fundamental physics is an important foundation to biology, and a part of the way "we learn more about our own biology."
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